The Good Life

TM’s new HSBB

Last week I signed up for TM’s Unifi HSBB 5Mbps plan, and a few days ago the TM guys came to my house to set it up. Let me list down the steps that a Streamyx user needs to go through before signing up for Unifi.

You need to call Unifi (1300881222) to inform them you want to sign up. They’ll ask you which plan and all other details. They’ll then schedule a time for the Unifi guys to come to your house to set up

You need to close your Streamyx account. From a user point of view, this is plain stupid. A user simply doesn’t care if Unifi and Streamyx are 2 different business units in TM, because a user simply sees TM as 1 company. Anyway, I had to go a nearby TM Point to fill in a form to close my account. Thank god the whole closing down experience was fast and smooth.

A few days later the Unifi guys came to my house. They arrived on-the-dot as promised at 9:30AM and they were very friendly. The agreed SLA from TM is that the installation would take less than 6 hours (my guess is that they’re playing it safe), but turns out the actual installation took about 2 hours+. The Unifi guys had to pull another cable from the TM post outside my house and wire it directly to where I want to set up the Unifi box.

The unifi package came with 4 devices (photo below)

Unifi setup

The tall grey device on the left is the TV Set Up box. It gives you 21 IPTV channels and TV-On-Demand (TVOD). The small white box with 2 antennas is the wireless router, and the white box on the right is the modem. A cordless phone (black) comes with the package too. All these 4 devices and the installation process were free-of-charge from TM. Awesome.

The Unifi guys did everything. The wireless network was set up with all the appropriate security settings. They even helped me perform a speed test which the results was more than pleasing:

Yup, that’s right, I signed up for the 5Mbps plan but my actual speed is 6.4Mbps! Now my internet at home is faster than what I have at work! Youtube videos loading the point the page loads, and I was able to download a 1GB file for around 1 hour! That’s how fast it is! TM definitely got it right this time around. Well done TM!

Post navigation

7 thoughts on “TM’s new HSBB”

How was the installation? Will they do concealed wiring? I have a brand new condo & don’t want to have wires running all over the place in plain view. I also have the phone junction box in the hallway, I want the set-top box in the lounge & the modem/IP phone to be in my home office. Will they do that? Or is dumping them on 1 desk the way they do it?

Of course there are still rumours floating round that they don’t even wire condos yet, despite the email that I got from TM stating “we are very pleased to inform that the UniFi service will be available in stages, in your particular neighbourhood.”

The installation was fast and tidy. You don’t see the wires dangling around the house. They used the same path as the old telephone cable. I’m not sure about condos as you might have a centralised box. You can clarify if they do condos when you call them.

Anyway, I believe the modem, router, TV setup box and telephone needs to be near each other as the connection jumps from one to another (there’s a LAN cable connecting the devices):

1) A cable from the modem to the wireless router
2) A cable from the modem to the wireless phone
3) A cable from the router to the TV Set Up box

When the speed cap is implemented… try downloading a 3GB file size, an ISO linux distribution is about 3.7gb. I am curious of how they will implement the cap. I heard that it is distributed evenly on daily basis.

Your subscription should be having a 60GB speed cap when the cap is implemented, meaning if distributed evenly daily, you will have a daily downloading capacity of 2GB, exceeding this will slow down your connection to, i gues 5 to 10 % of the advertised speed.

If the cap is not distributed evenly on daily basis… then it is GOOD deal… if it is the HSBB/Unifi is a no and no deal for me.

Hi Joe. As I recall the Unifi guy told me all 4 boxes need to be near the TV. Looking at the installation they did at my place, unless you have a really long cable, I think it’s best that everything is near to each other.

The phone needs to be near or beside the TV. A LAN cable connects the router to the TV Setup box, and a HDMI cable connects the TV Setup box to the TV.

1) A cable from the modem to the wireless router – IP connection (max cable length 90m)
2) A cable from the modem to the wireless phone – IP connection (max cable length 90m)
3) A cable from the router to the TV Set Up box – IP connection (max cable length 90m)

u can put the modem hidden somewhere in your house, set-up box near ur tv, the phone near ur desired location and the wifi router somewhere else. i think all u need to do is pay the unifi guys extra for the extra LAN cable length.